Death Sentence (18 page)

“Naturally.”

“The sources of the vigilante's intelligence, I mean. How he identifies the criminals. How he finds out when and where the crimes will take place.” Cavender leaned forward now, peering at the policeman with something like a vindictive gleam. “How does he do it, Captain? How does he do it so easily?”

“There's a certain logic to it. In some of the cases it's pretty obvious that he sets himself up as a mark. He probably dresses fairly well, and a man who's well-dressed walking alone in some neighborhoods is an open invitation to a mugging. He just waits for them to come to him, and when they begin to attack him he kills them. It isn't that hard, if you know the city and the neighborhoods.”

“I see. But what about the cases where he's interrupted crimes against other persons?”

“We have a theory that he has access to information about criminals. Possibly police records or court records. He finds the name and address of a criminal, we think, and then he stakes out the criminal and tails him until the criminal makes a move. Then the vigilante moves in for the kill. We're assuming this because nearly all his victims have had prior records of arrest and conviction. Therefore we assume the vigilante has access to these records. Of course a lot of them are matters of public record—he could find them in the official directories of court proceedings, or even the newspaper morgues.”

“Yes. Or the files of the Police Department itself?”

“It's possible.” Mastro actually smiled: it was evident he knew what was coming.

Cavender plunged. “Doesn't this suggest the strong possibility that the vigilante is himself a police officer?”

In the rocking chair Harry Chisum snorted. “What absolute bloody rubbish.”

Mastro was still smiling, his grey face wavering on the television screen. “I wouldn't call it a strong possibility. But we admit it's a possibility. We're not ignoring that avenue of investigation. We're checking it out.”

“Yes, of course. But it leads to a far more compelling question, doesn't it, Captain.”

“What question?”

“Simply this. If the vigilante can so easily find these criminals, and beat them to the punch as it were, then
why can't the police do the same thing?
”

“You mean kill them on sight, Mr. Cavender?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean, Captain. Why can't our policemen be as successful as this vigilante in preventing crimes?”

“Actually they are. They're far more successful, as a matter of fact.”

“You've just lost me, Captain.”

“We assign plainclothes officers to shadow known criminals, particularly some of those who are let out on bail, or those who have just returned from prison, or others when we receive tips from our informants that they're planning something. We have a sizable group of detectives that's assigned to surveillance of these suspects, and quite often the surveillance results in arrests when the officers apprehend the suspects in the act of committing crimes. But the point is, these arrests don't generate the kind of publicity the vigilante gets with his cold-blooded murders. As a case in point, the vigilante has killed at least sixteen people in the past two weeks or so—or at least that's the number of killings that have been attributed to him. At the same time, our stakeouts have resulted in more than forty arrests, under very similar circumstances. But naturally these arrests don't make headlines the way vigilante murders do.”

“An entire metropolitan police department prevents only two or three times as many crimes from being consummated as one man with a couple of handguns. Isn't that a pretty woeful batting average for the police?”

“We don't have unlimited funds or unlimited manpower, Mr. Cavender. If we had enough men and money to put tails on every suspected criminal in the streets of Chicago, we'd do it, believe me. It would make our job a whole lot simpler. But we've got a great deal to do, an enormous territory to cover, and a great many duties other than crime prevention and suspect-shadowing. We're spread thin, and I think we're doing a damn good job considering everything.”

“I have no doubt you feel that way, Captain, but I think you can understand how some of us may not agree with you completely.”

“That's your privilege.”

“I'm impressed, at any rate, by the fact that you haven't chosen to rear back on your dignity and plead that you've been hamstrung by the laws about entrapment and such.”

“We do have those problems, yes, but there's not much point bleating about them. We've got to operate within the system as it is, not as we'd like it to be.”

“I think we're all fortunate that's the case, Captain. Very well, I'd like to get your views on another side of this subject. What can you tell us about the vigilante himself?”

“In what sense?”

“What sort of person is he? Have you formed an impression of him?”

“A physical description?”

“Well obviously we're all eager to know whether you have a description of the man yet, after all this time, but in addition to that, I think our audience is curious to know what picture of the vigilante you may have formed in your own mind. What sort of personality he is. What his character is. Anything you may have concluded about his background, or especially his motives. But let's start with the physical description, since you mentioned it. What does he look like?”

“I'd prefer not to go into much detail about how much we know about him. I can say this much. We believe he's a male Caucasian.”

“A white man.”

“Yes.”

“Ruling out blacks, Spanish-Americans, Orientals, American Indians, women and children. Well that's quite a step, Captain, it must narrow the field right down to two or three million suspects.”

Mastro only smiled in reply; he was, Paul saw, genuinely amused.

“What else can you tell us, then? Do you think he has delusions? That he suffers, for example, from messianic fantasies?”

“I'm not a psychiatrist. I don't know. All we have is the record of what he's actually done. He could have any number of motives or delusions.”

“He's been clever enough to elude your massive task force for quite a long time now.”

“He's not a raving maniac, no.” Mastro was still smiling with the side of his mouth. “He's probably an ordinary citizen unless you happen to catch him with a smoking gun in his hand.”

“Well obviously there's at least one important difference between the vigilante and the rest of us ordinary citizens.”

“He shoots people.”

“Yes, quite.”

Mastro said, “I think everybody has fantasies of violence at one time or another. Even the most civilized people experience anger at some point in their lives. Your wife is mugged, or your kid is beaten up, or somebody slashes the tires of your car—the nature of the offense is almost beside the point. It's the sense that you personally have been violated. I remember once years ago I left my car parked on a side street while my wife and I visited some friends. It was our personal car, not an official vehicle. We had an old convertible at the time. When we left our friends' house and returned to our car, I found that the canvas roof had been slashed by vandals. Well it was an old clunker of a car, the whole car probably wasn't worth a hundred dollars, and no real lasting damage or great cost had been inflicted on me. But in spite of the fact that I've been a cop all my adult life and I've had to deal with things that are unspeakably worse than this trivial vandalism of a piece of canvas, I still had a predictable natural reaction to this event.”

“What was it?”

“The same as yours or anybody's, under equivalent circumstances. For just a moment there, in the hot rage of the instant, I had the feeling that if I'd been there in time to see the man slash the car, I'd have killed the son of a bitch in his tracks.”

“You would?”

“Instant gut reaction, Mr. Cavender. I'd been threatened. That car, poor as it was, was my own personal property, and by attacking it this guy had violated
me
in a very personal sense.”

“Would you really have shot him if you'd caught him in the act? You do carry a gun.”

“Yes, I carry a gun, and no, I would not have shot him. I've been a police officer for twenty-two years, including service with the military, and I've never killed a man with a gun.”

“Never?”

“I've shot a few and wounded them but I've never killed a man.”

“You must be rather proud of that record. I know I commend it.”

“Thank you. I can't say it's always a matter of choice. Perhaps I've been lucky: I've never been pushed into a position where I had no choice but to kill, in the line of duty. I don't think we can condemn officers who've found themselves in the position, though.”

“Let's get back to the slashing of your car.”

“I carry a gun. If I'm not mistaken, I had it on my person that night when we discovered the vandalism. And my gut reaction, as I said, was red-hot anger: I'd have killed the guy, I told myself, if I'd caught him. Now the point is, I wouldn't actually have killed him. I'd have arrested him. But that situation didn't apply, you see. The guy wasn't really there—he'd done his slashing and he was long gone by then. And
because
he wasn't there, I was free to indulge in this angry fantasy of killing the guy in retaliation for his violation of my person. Do you see what I'm getting at?”

“You're saying nearly everybody has experienced that kind of fantasy at one time or another.”

“Yes. It's a natural thing, it's human reaction. A sort of safety valve. But fortunately most of us have inhibitions, we're conditioned by the rules of our society, we have consciences. We don't actually shoot people for minor infractions. But we do dream about it from time to time. The guy who insulted you in the parking lot last week—you dream about going back there and punching him in the face until he's a bloody wreck. But of course you don't actually do it. You wouldn't get any pleasure out of it even if you did. The pleasure is in the fantasy, because in fantasies you don't have to worry about conscience or inhibitions.”

“Go on, Captain.”

“All I'm saying is, the vigilante is like everybody else, except for one thing. Somewhere in him, there's a wire down. There's been a disruption of contact between fantasy and reality. The conscience and inhibitions have been neutralized by this breakdown, and he's free to go out and act out these fantasies which are perfectly natural in all of us,
but only so long as they remain fantasies.
The minute he begins to act these things out, he steps over the boundary between civilization and savagery, between conscience and amorality.”

“Between, if you like, good and evil.”

“Yes.”

“Captain, I must admit you're an impressive man. You've got a good mind, you're far better spoken than I'd anticipated.”

“We're not all lump-headed flatfeet, Mr.Cavender.”

Cavender said, “Let me act as devil's advocate for a moment, Captain. It's been said, rather loudly and in conspicuous places, that the vigilante has been a force for good in this city. That his actions, and the publicity about them, have acted as a deterrent. That he's neutralized a few thugs and scared a lot more of them off the streets. Now we've heard a lot of statistics since this man started. We've heard that muggings are way down, and we've heard that they aren't. You've been remarkably candid with me tonight, and I wonder if I can impose on you to be equally candid in answering this one. Can I?”

“Well the statistics are down, that's a fact. They're down about twenty per cent in the past two weeks. Part of that is the seasonal drop—the Christmas spirit and all that. Part of it's probably attributable to the vigilante, but there's no way to put a specific figure on it.”

“That's honest enough.”

“I can tell you this much. It's not an enormous drop. I mean he hasn't scared half the crooks off the streets or anything like that. He may have dissuaded ten per cent of them—temporarily.”

“Well that means one mugging in ten hasn't taken place, doesn't it?”

“You could put it that way,” Mastro said in even tones. “But I'd like your audience to see it this way also. This afternoon a bakery owner who said he'd been inspired by the vigilante tried to shoot it out with two bandits in his bakery. He ended up dead, and he ended up getting all three of the shop assistants shot along with him. Two of them died and the third one was badly wounded. And a few days ago we had a bus driver shoot an unarmed man to death. The bus driver was another fan of the vigilante's. I think we're going to see a lot more tragedies like those before this thing is finished, and I'd like to ask people to just think about it before they arm themselves and go out into the streets looking for trouble. What's more important, a few wallets and handbags and television sets, or the lives of innocent people and unarmed people?”

“I certainly agree with that wholeheartedly, Captain.”

“Violence answers no questions,” Mastro said. “But unfortunately it's a spreading infection. It's a lot harder to stop it than it is to start it.”

“Yes. Well thank you very much, Captain.” Cavender turned to the camera. “We've been talking with Captain Victor Mastro of the Chicago Police Department,” he began, and Irene switched the set off. The picture dwindled to a piercing white dot that whistled for a while before it died.

Harry Chisum said, “He's fighting a losing battle.”

Paul looked at him, trying to ascertain his tone.

Irene said, “Cavender, or Vic Mastro?”

“Your good captain,” Chisum said. “I don't think he'll ever find his vigilante.”

“Don't you? You may be underestimating him. He's a good cop. One of the best.”